Lord, forgive me for my night with Rosario Dawson. Forgive me for the talk about faulty condoms. Forgive me for the stuff about her grandmother's sex habits, girlie sounds during foreplay, and enhanced butts. Forgive me for everything involving erogenous zones and the Hustler store. Forgive me for looking at Rosario Dawson as she fired a 20-gauge Beretta shotgun, then cackled and stuck her tongue out a la Gene Simmons. Forgive me for committing adultery in my heart.

To paraphrase Saint Augustine, forgive me--but just a little later. Because I have to think about this stuff for a bit longer. You know, to write this story.

LET ME BACK UP. For the past few months, I've been trying to live my life strictly according to the rules of the Bible. No coveting, no bearing false witness, no blended fabrics, no idolatry. It's for a book I'm working on. So my satanic Esquire bosses thought it'd be fun to tempt me with Dawson, the sexy movie star you see in the photo there, the one who discussed a wide range of bodily fluids in the movie Kids, who famously shed her clothes for Colin Farrell in Alexander, who sprayed bullets from a machine gun in Sin City wearing nothing but a leather dog collar and a couple square inches of fishnet.

Things start out innocently enough. I meet Dawson, twenty-six, at a harmless California cafe, the kind with organic root beer and whole-wheat bagels. She arrives wearing a beige sweater and jeans. Very discreet, nothing overly revealing. I am relieved. I'll say this: If I am going to associate with a secular woman, Dawson is looking like a good choice. First off, she doesn't judge my Old Testament appearance. Thanks to the Bible's ban on beard trimming, I have facial hair that lies somewhere on the spectrum between Ted Kaczynski and the late-model Mel Gibson. It's a look that causes quite a bit of concern at airports. It recently made a five-year-old girl cry and run away. Dawson--whom I'd warned in advance--is perhaps the only woman so far who hasn't found it alarming. Or at least so she claims.

"I love a big beard," she says, adding somewhat cryptically, "When I was a kid, I had this idea that I would have a beard when I got older. I thought it'd be nice to rub my chin."

Second, it's not like her sole aim is to make me sin. When I first met her, I felt compelled to shake her hand--which is dangerous, since I'm not supposed to be touching women during their impure time of the month. But Dawson assures me not to worry: "I'm not in my red tent."

Quite considerate.

We decide to go for a hike in Topanga Canyon and admire the glory of God's green earth.

And then we start to talk, which is when things get a little tricky. Here she is talking about some recent reading material: "I bought the December Playboy because Marilyn Monroe is on the cover, and I've just become obsessed with her again. And I'm flipping through it, and there's a section on the highlights of the year. And there's me and Colin and my breasts. Playboy was congratulating me on my breasts. Not too shabby!"

Okay then. I'll be saying some prayers tonight.

We move on to the importance of family. Family. Now there's a nice, safe topic.

"My brother and I got my mom her chest pierced for Mother's Day a couple of years ago. But she had to take them out. She does carpentry, and it got infected by all the dust. You've got to be careful where you get pierced."

Hmm. Maybe a ritual cleansing bath would be in order.

Getting back to the family:

"In my family, you are either very large-breasted with small hips or very small-breasted with large hips. We're all a little lopsided. I'm a little lopsided, which is totally fine. I have no hips. I'm the hipless wonder."

She brings this up because her mom thought a line in Rent--namely "I have the best ass below Fourteenth Street"--was in need of a rewrite. "My mom was like, 'You? The best ass below Fourteenth Street?'

"The moral of the story is that they used a lot of smoke and mirrors to make my booty look fantabulous."

Well, maybe I could build an altar and make a sin offering. Is it possible to find an unblemished heifer in L. A.?

Here's the thing: Rosario Dawson is open. She's friendly. She talks in paragraphs, veering from one body part to another, from yoga to the Hustler store (where you can get a "cup of coffee and handcuffs"). She's got less of a filter than any other celebrity I've interviewed, with the possible exception of Bill Maher, who doesn't really count, because with him you kind of want a filter. As a journalist, I'm delighted. As a man trying to obey the Good Book, I'm going to need three weeks of decompression at a monastery.

WE'VE FINISHED THE HIKE, and Dawson is steering her Toyota Prius along some of Los Angeles's twistiest dirt roads. Dawson looks at me while she's talking--which is polite and impressive and a little scary. I know I'm supposed to avert my eyes, but I can't help but notice her skin. It's the smoothest skin I've seen outside of a Clinique ad.

I ask her about her childhood--perhaps a tamer topic than her anatomy. In true Biblical form, Dawson starts at the beginning--right at conception.

"I was conceived on Avenue X in Brooklyn with a prison condom that broke," she says (a prison condom being a condom they give you when you leave prison, just to clarify). "My mom was ready to get an abortion. She was at the clinic, had an appointment. And then she says she felt me move, and she fell in love with me right then. But I was just a speck, so it wasn't me moving. It was probably gas."

Also not so ordinary. Dawson--a mix of Puerto Rican, Native American, Cuban, African-American, and Irish--grew up in a squat on the Lower East Side. When the family moved in, there was no electricity, no water, a hole in the floor, and a crack house across the street. Her mom was sixteen when Rosario was born and kept her in line with an interesting discipline technique: licking. "She'd lick me right across my cheek like a cougar. And it was just so humiliating."

It's not hard to figure out that Dawson's mom is the key to her lack of self-censorship. This is a mom who got a Mohawk on her fortieth birthday and who always advised Dawson to "double-bag it" in the bedroom.

And that's not to mention Dawson's grandmother--seventy years old, still wears a bikini, up till 4:00 A.M. tossing back shots of Jack. "She'll call up and be like, 'It's my birthday. We did it. Twice!'

"The only way for me to rebel is to be really straitlaced and have a nice home and no tattoos."

When she was fifteen, Dawson was sitting on a stoop, laughing hard at something dumb, when she was spotted by director Larry Clark. He cast her in Kids. Dawson gives a remarkable performance for a teenager. Heck, for anyone. It's natural and startling, filled with dialogue about various acts forbidden by Leviticus and about getting bitten by mosquitoes on her butt while losing her virginity.

In the eleven years since then, she's cranked out twenty-five films, the latest being Killshot, an Elmore Leonard thriller opening this summer in which she plays a woman in a trailer park obsessed with Elvis.

Some of her movies, like The Adventures of Pluto Nash, with Eddie Murphy, are best kept off your Netflix queue. But others, like 25th Hour, Rent, and Sin City, have made her a semihousehold name. In that last one, she plays a prostitute who, without warning, takes a chomp out of Alexis Bledel's neck. "For her, it was icky and weird," says Dawson. "But I was having a great time with it. It was this little bit of plastic, and the blood is this mixture of dye and sugar. It was really good, really tasty."

THAT NIGHT AT DINNER--she took me to an L. A. restaurant with its own gift shop of Buddhist books--Dawson takes a break to call her boyfriend.

The boyfriend is Jason Lewis, who starred as Kim Cattrall's longhaired boy toy on Sex and the City. Dawson and Lewis live together, surf together, dirt-bike together, and compost together. He's not a beta male, this guy. Rosario has said she'll never date a man who doesn't know how to put up a retaining wall. And we can assume he doesn't make high-pitched squeals during sex. "I got so turned off by this guy I was once fooling around with because he kept making girl noises," she told me earlier. "He was like, Oooo, oooo! I was like, Wow, that's really not something I ever needed to know about you."

Dawson and her boyfriend love skeet shooting, it turns out. It's their version of bowling, but, you know, more violent.

This could be good. As far as I can tell, the Bible doesn't object to smashing clay pigeons, and it's probably a smart idea to do something besides talk about man squeals and such. If I promise not to point a gun barrel at anyone's forehead, maybe we could all go?

Twenty minutes later, Dawson pulls her Prius into a parking lot at the Oak Tree Gun Club. There are not a lot of other Priuses in the parking lot, unless Toyota makes a hybrid pickup truck I'm not aware of. This place is like a slice of Topeka right in the middle of Bikram-yoga-and-Jamba-Juice-filled Los Angeles. Guys in fatigues. Nonironic trucker caps. And stuffed animals cluttering the lobby--not just the traditional moose head, mind you, but pretty much any vertebrate you can think of: ostriches, polar bears, giraffes.

Dawson picks up her Beretta. And as she walks out to the range, she turns around and sticks out her tongue. It's her favorite facial expression. "My publicist is always getting mad at me, because every picture I take is with my tongue out," she says.

She fishes a shell out of her pocket. She splays her legs. Her butt juts out just a bit. Her lace shirt sticks out from under her sweatshirt. Her left hand is way down the barrel. Her smile fades. Pull! Then a pop, and her body jerks back a bit. The neon-yellow clay pigeon splinters into four parts.

Dawson uncocks the gun, then blows into the chamber, expelling a puff of smoke. Once again, she sticks out her tongue.

It makes for a compelling visual, even if you don't regularly log on to gunchicks.com.